I will be in the middle of doing something and all of a sudden I get a system message that says the system is going down now. I was thinking possibly a weak PSU, but it is a dual boot setup and XP works great. I have never had any problems with XP, but linux always seems to shutdown. I have already ruled out heat as an issue, and I am running out of clues.
It is a fresh install of suse 10.1 and I haven't changed anything. All I have done is try to get my videocard drivers installed, and I can't even get that far.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Okay, there's a few things to check, I'm thinking. First off, I've never seen this happen in Linux unless somebody else logged in and shut the system down. So lets' start eliminating possibilities. Does it do it in other desktops? Gnome? KDE? If it does, try changing the default init level to "3" in /etc/inittab so that X doesn't start by default. Still shuts down? Try booting it in failsafe mode. Try killing the power management daemon (type "/etc/init.d/powersaved stop" as root). If that doesn't work, try running Memtest86 (use the Memory Test option, if you have it, in Grub when you boot up).

My first thought is that very few things have permission to shut the system down, so it's either a powersave daemon bug, a system script gone wacky, hardware failure (which you've pretty much ruled out) or somebody actually doing it on purpose (VERY unlikely). It's possible your motherboard's implimentation of APM isn't industry standard, and the kernel tries to power something down which results in the whole system shutting down.

Let us know how this works out.

I tried stopping the powersave and that didn't work. I don't have gnome as an option, how do I get it on there? I tried the other ones like blackbox icewm and a few others, and it ran fine. As soon as I went into KDE about 2 minutes goes by and then I get the message that the system's going down for halt now. A friend of mine suggested I try a linux live cd, so I did. I booted with Knoppix and it semed to work fine. I'm not sure what to do next...

Sorry for the double post...

Ok, after booting into openbox I tried to install GNOME. I just searched for it and checked everything. About halfway through the install all open windows close and it just goes to konsole mode and says sending processes the term signal. Them bam powers off. I am totally clueless as it doesn't seem to be a KDE problem anymore.

Woohoo triple post!

I am thinking this is hardware related, so I ran a memory test overnight and I had 0 errors. So I am guessing this has to be a bad PSU? Any other suggestions? I am showing 11.47 on the +12V and 4.7 on the +5V. I know this is probably pointing towards a bad PSU, but why have I not seen any crashes in windows?

Well, since it only does it in KDE, then it must be something to do with the kpowersave program. If you see a little AC plug icon in the system tray, that's kpowersave. Right-click it and play with the settings. I'm guessing it's got auto-suspend or something enabled, which is retarded, but it happens. Turn all of that off and see if it still shuts down. I'm definitely curious now.

Well...I forgot to mention that I tried to get GNOME installed while I was in openbox. About halfway through the install it did it again. Next time I went into ICEWM and did nothing. I didn't even move the mouse and sure enough it still did it. This is really starting to piss me off now, as I was skeptical about suse to begin with. I tried a live knoppix cd in my main PC and it runs fine, although I have a much stronger PSU in that one. I guess I need to put my Linux HDD in my main PC and see if it still happens? I'm up for trying anything.

You'll run into all kinds of problems if you try to just swap the drive into another computer. How much stuff do you have hooked up in this machine? What rating is the power supply? If it's a power issue, try removing all periphereals except the hard drive and video card and see if it still does it. Try swapping out a bigger power supply. If it's really a power issue, that would show it.